Walk the Walk (Sam Durant)
2018 - Installation (Installation)
44 x 33 inches
Native Art Department International
The neon sign Walk the Walk (Sam Durant) overlays a Walk/Don’t Walk Sign crosswalk sign onto the text “You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect.” The sign asks viewers to not walk on Indigenous lands without respecting it, and, switching between a walking person icon in white and a raised hand icon in red, redirects their actions. This work by Native Art Department International signals a reminder that we–the audience and institution–are located on and occupy traditional territories. The work appropriates and twists white artist Sam Durant’s You Are On Indian Land Show Some Respect (2008) in response to his work Scaffold (2012) installed in 2016-7 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. The structure resembled a high-design jungle gym, with a miscellany of stairways that visitors climb to reach a massive platform. The participatory public sculpture intended to commemorate the seven capital punishments that took place between 1859 and 2006, including the largest mass execution in United States history, in which thirty-eight Dakota Sioux men were hanged, in 1862, in Mankato, Minnesota. The sculpture ignited protests among Dakota Sioux activists in Minneapolis, fuelled not only by anger about the cultural appropriation of murder by the artist but also by the insensitive resonance with the current suicide rate among Native American teenagers–the highest of any population in the United States. The protests eventually lead to the removal and dismantlement of the sculpture. The sculptural remains were handed to Dakota elders who buried the material and the Dakota Oyate now retains intellectual property of the work. Anchored in the long history of appropriation in the arts, Walk the Walk (Sam Durant) engages with complex and recent discussions about cultural appropriation in the art world as recent controversies have unfolded such as Dana Schutz at the Whitney Biennale, Sam Durant at the Walker, Luke Willis Thompson for the Turner prize. Namely: How can artists responsibly use images that are not their own, especially when those images are tied to the history and trauma of another culture? And how can museums display such work while respectfully engaging with marginalized communities?
Native Art Department International is a collaborative project created in 2016 and administered by Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan. Their work–spanning panel talks, collective art-making, performances, theater, sculpture, and video–has often addressed critical issues relevant in the art world while integrating art historical and references from Native American and Canadian art. Within this context, they have examined systems of support and created strategies to challenge narratives that essentialize and instrumentalize artists’ practices based on their identities. More specifically, their practice explores the potential of collaborative and collective ways of working and producing art to challenge the dominant (art) historical canons and rectify the absence of overlooked narratives and perspectives.
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